The Internet of things (IoT) refers to the trend towards providing communication networking to a wide variety of devices such as vehicles and appliances. An appliance may be coupled to an electronic communication module that communicatively couples the appliance to the Internet. The electronic communication module may collect sensor data and state data from the appliance and transmit it to the Internet. The electronic communication module may receive control commands from the Internet and provide them to the appliance. For example, an application on a smart phone may be used by a home owner to command the air conditioning thermostat to begin cooling the house down while the owner is waiting to collect his or her luggage at the airport after completing a business trip. As the IoT expands, new applications and new functionality are developed and deployed using the IoT as an infrastructure.